truthdig | Fliers reading
“Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Wants You to Join” appeared in
the mailboxes of white families in Memphis in early January. The Ku Klux
Klan also distributed pamphlets a few days ago in an Atlanta suburb.
The Tennessee Legislature last year officially declared July 13 as
Nathan Bedford Forrest Day to honor his birthday. There are 32
historical markers honoring Forrest in Tennessee alone and several in
other Southern states. Montgomery, Ala., which I visited last fall, has a
gigantic Confederate flag on the outskirts of the city, planted there
by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Confederate monuments dot
Montgomery’s city center. There are three Confederate state holidays in
Alabama, including Martin Luther King/Robert E. Lee Day. Alabama,
Florida, Georgia and Mississippi also honor Lee’s birthday. Jefferson
Davis’ birthday is a state holiday in Alabama and Florida. And
re-enactments of Confederate victories in the Civil War crowd Southern
calendars.
The steady rise of ethnic nationalism over the past decade, the
replacing of history with mendacious and sanitized versions of lost
glory, is part of the moral decay that infects a dying culture. It is a
frightening attempt, by those who are desperate and trapped, to escape
through invented history their despair, impoverishment and hopelessness.
It breeds intolerance and eventually violence. Violence becomes in this
perverted belief system a cleansing agent, a way to restore a lost
world. There are ample historical records that disprove the myths
espoused by the neo-Confederates, who insist the Civil War was not about
slavery but states’ rights and the protection of traditional
Christianity. But these records are useless in puncturing their
self-delusion, just as documentary evidence does nothing to blunt the
self-delusion of Holocaust deniers.
Those who retreat into fantasy
cannot be engaged in rational discussion, for fantasy is all that is
left of their tattered self-esteem. When their myths are attacked as
untrue it triggers not a discussion of facts and evidence but a
ferocious emotional backlash. The challenge of the myth threatens what
is left of hope. And as the economy unravels, as the future looks
bleaker and bleaker, this terrifying myth gains potency.
